Beautiful All Along
by lupine-eyes
Summary: Annie's distaste of a certain trope sparks a discussion between her and Abed on media and feelings, and leads to the revelation they've all been waiting for.


**A/n:**This is what happens when I spend too much time reading TVTropes. That website will ruin your life. It's also the first longer piece I've ever done in present tense, so if it feels awkward or detached, I apologize in advance. It just really wanted to be in present tense for some reason, but I might have slipped up here and there.

Feedback on character, dialogue, prose, anything really would be greatly appreciated, and I hope you enjoy it~  
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Beautiful All Along

It's a Saturday, and the residents of Casa Troyannabed are watching Goblet of Fire in the living room. Troy's enraptured with the TV, curled up in his recliner. Annie's perched on the arm of Abed's, leaning into him ever so slightly, and he finds he doesn't mind. As long as it's her, or Troy, physical contact isn't quite a scary. He even finds himself looking for reasons to touch her, to hold her hand. He wonders if she's comfortable where she is, but he doesn't ask. He doesn't want to give her an excuse to leave.

She's become a fixture in their home these past few months, and though sometimes she complains to Britta that she feels a little bit like Wendy, she's more than willing to participate in most of their adventures. Lately, she even starts a few herself, dragging them along with her to explore worlds they hadn't thought of yet.

She's the one who started them on the Harry Potter binge, appalled that somehow Troy hadn't seen any of the movies. Abed privately agreed with her. Harry Potter was a pop culture phenomenon, sporting one of the largest and most wide-reaching fandoms in existence, to have been completely ignorant of it was like not knowing the earth revolved around the sun.

So they picked a weekend to marathon the movies, and Troy is absolutely enthralled. He asks Abed during a break in the films, excitement setting his voice abnormally high, if they can do a Harry Potter simulation in the Dreamatorium, which devolves into an argument over who should be Harry. It's already settled that Annie would be Hermione, not because she's a girl, Troy says carefully, but because they've got similar personalities.

Annie admires Hermione, who manages to be badass as well as studious, and doesn't say anything. She wonders if they'll still be as eager to play the lead after they finish the movies.

They pop in the next movie, deciding the argument can wait until after they've finished all eight.

Things run smoothly, until the movie gets to the point where Ron is getting an eyeful of the made-over Hermione at the Yule Ball. Troy makes an appreciative noise, but Annie groans to herself, muttering something about hating that trope under her breath.

Abed, although normally loathe to stop a movie halfway through, or even _talk_during it, turns to her. He had never heard that word come from, well anyone else outside his media studies class. "Which trope?"

Annie looks over her shoulder at her roommate, her face flushing. "The whole 'beautiful all along thing,' you know? Like all a girl has to do is dress nicer and wear some makeup, and make sure to take off those glasses, and suddenly every man she's ever wanted will fall right into her lap. Or at least take notice of her. It's ridiculous, and kind of insulting. I mean, if being someone completely different is what gets someone to notice you, you're better off not being with that person _anyway_. Because it's not you they like, it's that new persona you're putting on. The… um… not-you." Her face gets reader with every sentence, and soon her eyes are boring little holes in her hands, currently bunched up in her pajama pants.

Abed gets the feeling they're no longer talking about what he thinks they're talking about anymore, when Annie stands up, muttering something about needing more to drink, he knows he's right.

He turns back to the TV, but his thoughts are elsewhere, even as Harry dived into the lake to find his loved ones.

It all depended on what her subtext meant. He's not good at subtext, though, and he knows it. Even with characters, he sometimes has difficulty discerning their motivations and the stuff beneath the surface. Patterns are the only things that guide him.

The clock is ticking though, and he knows this is time-sensitive. She needs time enough to cool down, but if he waits too long the moment will have passed.

He waits just long enough for Harry to drag Ron and Fleur's little sister to the surface, and he gets up, ignoring Troy's questioning look, and strides over to the kitchen, where Annie is still half-buried in the fridge.

He waits on the other side of the door, his eyes boring into her half-crouched form. She feels the intensity of his gaze after a few seconds, but takes a full minute to get the courage to shut the fridge and face him, coke in hand.

"Abed?" her voice hitches just a little, and the warble in her voice makes him think she's upset.

"Are you okay?" he asks, cocking his head slightly, like a spaniel.

"Um… sure." She backs away, taking the door with her enough for Abed to get through. He shuts it behind him, and follows her to the bed, the only place to sit down in the room. "Yeah, I'm fine."

He studies her for a second, noting her discomposure. Her hair ever so slightly in disarray, her eyes tinged with red.

"I've been thinking about what you said," he says flatly, "But I think we're going to have to agree to disagree," he says flatly.

Her lips draw into a small moue of confusion. "What do you mean?"

"The beautiful-all-along trope," he explains, waiting a beat for it to sink in before continuing. "Sometimes people get stuck in their roles, especially with a comfortable friendship, and it becomes difficult to see someone as anything other than how you've always seen them. The moment when one does something unexpected – like ditching the glasses – can shake up one's view of a person, shock them out of their comfortable routine and force them to view a close friend in a different light, as a viable romantic partner. So while perhaps it is a bit of a cliché, there's a reason for it.

"So as long as the shock awakens feelings that were already there, I think it viable."

He cocks his head as Annie bites her lower lip. "But we weren't really talking about tropes, were we?"

Annie opens her mouth to answer, but all that emerges is a small sound of frustration, and she stares back down at her drink.

"Is it Jeff?"

She needs a second to process it, though she shouldn't be surprised. Abed didn't do social niceties. A beat later, she lets out a short, bitter laugh. "Everyone thinks it should be Jeff, don't they? But no. Jeff…" she makes a frustrated noise. "Jeff is Superman."

They're mixing metaphors, and Abed has no response. He just waits until she continues of her own volition.

"Did you ever watch that 90s sitcom Lois and Clark?" He nods; he's seen everything that has to do with DC comics. She goes on, encouraged, though she keeps her eyes on the coke in her hand. "My mom had this huge crush on Dean Cain, so we used to watch the DVDs back before… the whole rehab thing." She clears her throat. "But, I always had this theory that Lois was never _really_in love with Superman, you know? He was safe. This paragon of truth and justice, the ideal guy, right? But he's untouchable, and she knows it will never happen. So he can never hurt her, right? It's like that. Except, there's no such thing as being safe," she takes a deep breath. "And feelings are far easier to bruise than they're supposed to be. But Jeff was never going to happen, and even if it did, I'm sure I wouldn't want it."

Abed continue staring at her, wide-eyed, until she lets out a small, awkward laugh. "That sounded a lot more succinct in my head."

She pushes a stray strand of hair back behind her ear, and his eyes follow the gesture. He nods. "It's like the reality will never fit in with what you have in your head."

Her lips quirk upward, and she's both amused and frustrated with her inability to make any sense. "More like I've realized I never really liked him that way in the first place, you know? I just wanted to believe I did because he's well… he's charming and cool and everything I should like," she looks up at him through her eyelashes.

Everything the protagonist is supposed to be. But tropes can be subverted, so why not expectations?

"But, really I just don't think of him like that anymore," she finishes. Her words feel so ineffectual and tangled up. She just hope she's gotten whatever she's been trying to say across.

"If it's not Jeff," and the thought cheers him in a strange way, "What's wrong?"

Annie's fingers start drumming on the can, and she worries her bottom lip with her teeth, unable to think of a way to broach the topic.

Abed considers her for a long moment. She's nervous, he observes. And if she's not talking about her and Jeff, there's really only one thing that she could be talking about. He may miss social cues, but tropes? Tropes he has down, and this pattern is one he's been looking for.

He steps in, and she backs away from him a half-step, until she's got her back against the counter. She looks up, eyes widening and her breath hitching in her throat. He can feel his own heart beat a little faster in response, adrenaline spiking to above normal levels. Even his hands start to sweat, but he's not nervous. No, this feeling is definitely on the happier side of the panic scale. It's anticipation.

"Annie?"

"Yes, Abed?" her voice comes out as a squeak.

"May I kiss you?"

Her eyes are at anime proportions now, and she swallows. It only takes a second, and she nods.

Their kiss is slow and sweet and almost chaste, until Annie places her soda on the counter behind her, and wraps her hands around his neck. She takes a half step towards him until their bodies press against each other. His arms wrap around her waist, and he feels her rise up on her toes to get a better angle. The kiss lasts long enough for air to become an issue, so Abed breaks it first, drawing in much needed oxygen.

He surveys her; her face is flushed and her eyes are shining, and she's beaming at him in a way that makes this feel like a fixed point in time. "Why, Miss Edison, you're beautiful."

The unexpected quote makes her laugh, and Abed feels something surge within him, but she sobers quickly, her face moving towards Disney territory and into something anxious. "I meant it though, Abed. I don't want you to think that I like you just because, well, of the characters you've played. I mean, that Han/Leia kiss last year was amazing, but that's not the only reason I… I mean, I do _like_ you, _like_you like you, and I have for a while, but…"

A small smile pulls at his lips, and she cuts her rant short, staring up at him in confusion.

"I know. You don't have to explain it. Maybe you just needed the wake-up call. I am pretty adorable." He waggles his eyebrows and she chuckles, looking at him speculatively from under her eyelashes. "And I like you too. _Like_you like you, I mean."

The admission makes her heart jump into her throat and stick the landing. She's thinking about going in for another kiss when Troy bursts into the kitchen, frowning.

"Guys, you've been in here forever, and you're missing the third contest!" His eyes swivel between Abed and Annie, and his lips quirk up in a Cheshire smile. "What's been going on in here?"

Annie's mouth opens and closes in an approximation of a fish, but Abed steps forward smoothly. "We were just discussing our next simulation, and…" his eyes flicked over to Annie. "We decided that you should play Harry."

Troy's face lights up like it's his expulsion day, and he and Abed clap their hands together to make it official.

Troy heads to the fridge to grab more milk for his special drink, and Annie leans to Abed, her expression holding so many unanswered questions. "Are you sure? I mean, Troy does have a pretty strong Ron-vibe." Especially since the whole fort fiasco – she couldn't help but see the parallels between Ron's anger at Harry and Troy's at Abed earlier that year.

"Yeah, but Harry doesn't end up with Hermione in the end," he replies enigmatically. He turns and heads back to his chair to wait for Troy, leaving Annie standing there staring after him.

Troy pushes past her, a fresh mug of special drink in his hand. "Come on, Annie. You're going to miss the ending."

Annie laughs and shakes her head at his enthusiasm, but follows her boys into the living room. She can't wait for the next excursion into the Dreamatorium.


End file.
